In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold; the figure was just one in five as recently as 2016. In Germany, more than 55 percent of new cars registered in December were electric or hybrid. In China, where more electric vehicles are sold than everywhere else in the world combined, the rise is perhaps even more dramatic: from 3.5 percent of the market at the beginning of 2020 to 20.3 percent at the beginning of 2022. And growing, of course: Nearly twice as many electric vehicles were sold last year in China as in the year before. The country also exported $3.2 billion worth of E.V.s last November alone, more than double the exports of the previous November. Its largest single manufacturer, BYD, has surpassed Tesla for global market share — so perhaps it should not be so surprising that Tesla’s stock is dimming while the global outlook is so sunny.
This is not just eye-popping growth, it is also dramatically faster than most analysts were projecting just a few years ago. In 2020, the International Energy Agency projected that the global share of electric vehicle sales would not top 10 percent before 2030. It appears we’ve already crossed that bar eight years early, and BloombergNEF now projects that the market share of E.V.s will approach 40 percent by the end of the decade. (The I.E.A. is less bullish but has still roughly doubled its 2030 projection in just two years.) The underlying production capacity is perhaps even more encouraging. In the United States, investments in battery manufacturing reached a record $73 billion last year — three times as much as the previous record, set the year before. Globally, battery manufacturing capacity grew almost 40 percent last year, and is projected to grow fivefold by just 2025. By that year, lithium mining is expected to be triple what it was in 2021.
Globally, there are 10 times as many electric scooters, mopeds and motorcycles on the road as true electric cars, accounting already for almost half of all sales of those vehicles and responsible already for eliminating more carbon emissions than all the world’s four-wheel E.V.s.
Excerpted from The New York Times, David Wallace-Wells, January 11, 2023:
Sales of heat pumps surpassed sales of gas furnaces in the U.S. in 2022, according to statistics from the Air-Conditioning Heating and Refrigeration Institute. They have been adopted even more quickly in Europe, paradoxically a co-benefit of the war in Ukraine. Sales grew 35 per cent in 2021 relative to 2020, compared with 15 per cent in the U.S. over the same period, the International Energy Agency reports.
Let’s hope predictions about energy renewables, electrification of the grid and e-cars is as wrong as McKinsey’s estimates of the cell phone usage in the United States in 1980. They forecasted 900,000 subscribers, less than 1% of the actual uptake: 109 million.
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash